Image: Observations of SN1987A at Different Wavelengths

Screen-use options: These files are created for viewing on your monitor

Print-use download options: These files are designed to fit on letter-size paper

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Hubble's optical light observations of Supernova
1987A become even more valuable when they are
combined with observations from telescopes that
can measure other kinds of radiation from the
exploding star. The image shows the evolving
images of hot spots from the Hubble Telescope
alongside images taken at approximately the same
time from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the
Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) radio
observatory. The X-ray images show an expanding
ring of gas, hotter than a million degrees, that
has evidently reached the optical ring at the
same time as the hot spots appeared. The radio
images show a similar expanding ring of radio
emission, caused by electrons moving through
magnetized matter at nearly the speed of light.

Taken together, these observations chronicle a
rare event never seen by astronomers: the birth
of a supernova remnant. Supernova remnants are
regions of interstellar space that have been
heated to several millions of degrees by the
impact of the debris from exploding stars with
surrounding gas. Astronomers have found dozens
of supernova remnants in our Milky Way galaxy,
caused by supernova explosions that have
occurred in the past few thousand years.